>On Behalf Of Max Sawicky
> I suppose kids have the time to sit around and
> burn CD's and DVD's for hours on end, but my guess
> is that most people don't... Ergo I have to wonder about the actual
> importance of this to copyright owners.
Max, I think you are missing the convergence of technologies that are making the record companies piss in their collective corporate pants. Burning CDs lasts for about two or three more years. Hard drives are about to appear that can hold more music than any traditional music collection out there. DVDs will be transferred directly to hard drives at lightning speeds; software like the Napster that you noted in your post will allow anyone else on the Internet to transfer the software from one hard drive to another; and new MP3 walkmans (the Rio is one present incarnation) with the memory to store large numbers of CDs will allow mixes of any songs you want to be taken on the road.
It adds up to a situation where music, in the hacker phrasing, "wants to be free" of the old hardware and will spread so easily that it will be very hard for the music industry to make money the old fashioned way, or even that the traditional industry players will even exist.
On the other hand, it's not clear that music artists will lose out. At the extreme, John Perry Barlow of the Grateful Dead is quite ready to kiss off royalties from record sales, since he argues artists can more than make it up in ways to directly sell their realtime live performances to the public without middle men taking a cut, where good music that never makes money now will get heard and allow bands to tour and sell tickets and band-related merchandise that will more than make up for the lost record sales.
I am not sure that Barlow's scenario works for all musicians-- it's awfully tailored to the Dead's experience. There is a reality, though, that given how little of the cost of a CDs actually goes to the artists themselves, there are real opportunities for those artists to gain for themselves a much larger percentage of consumer dollars spent on music. If we assume that people, especially teens and college students, will spend roughly the same amount on music as they were, the result may be a a lot more bands getting less money each from each consumer. But the total amount received by the actual bandmembers, as opposed to agents and record companies, will be higher than now.
We'll see how it shakes out, but on this one, the music industry is justifiably trying to use every legal weapon possible to stomp on these new technologies.
-- Nathan Newman